The past few days, every time I’ve seen a link to Wikipedia on this board, the linkbox that shows up has this text at the start of it. For instance, in the space elevator thread, a link to suspension bridges says
Is anyone else seeing this, or is it just me? If it’s just me, then I can’t imagine why, as I am not and never have been a Wikipedia editor. And even if I were, you’d think that the “learn more” bit would be a link, but it’s not. Is this a recent change in Wikipedia’s formatting, or something?
Here’s a live example of that link (though, like I said, it seems to happen with every Wikipedia link):
ETA, nevermind, it doesn’t look fine. I was thinking the “Pages for logged out editors learn more” was what you were seeing instead of the correct text. I missed that it’s prefacing it.
Yes, both of those images are what I’m seeing. Well, not with the same color scheme that @Joey_P is using, but I presume that’s either a browser or a board setting.
I’ve been seengin the same thing for aweek or two. I forget exactlywhen it started, btu it’s been consistent ever since whatever day that was.
Looking directly at their pages now, it appears to be an artifact of the recent major changes wiki has made to their look and feel. Something is formatted dumb that’s fooling the Discourse preview parser.
I think that the content of those linkboxes is generated by the source page, not Discourse at all, so the “Discourse preview parser” isn’t what’s getting fooled.
It appears that the new default Wikipedia skin (Vector 2022) is putting this text at the start of every page that is accessed by a non-logged-in user:
<p>
Pages for logged out editors <a data-mw="interface"
href="/wiki/Help:Introduction"
aria-label="Learn more about editing"><span>learn more</span></a>
</p>
This text is initially hidden (by some CSS I guess) but appears if you click the three-dot icon at the top right of the page. The Discourse preview tool apparently is not seeing that it is hidden text and is rendering it in the preview.
When they switched to the new layout I installed a FF extension that replaces URLs to wiki with a URL, also to wiki, but with the original Vector layout. So that link in the OP goes to “en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Suspension_bridge”, if I click on it, it takes me to “en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Suspension_bridge?useskin=vector”
FWIW, that extension doesn’t seem to have any effect on this problem. Whether that means both layouts have this problem or if the extension doesn’t ‘fix’ the problem in the preview, I don’t know.
Yes and no. As best I can determine, and I’d be happy to have a current webdev expert weigh in.
Discourse generates the preview box using various landmarks on the page identified via either HTML element name/ID or css class or aria class or … According to an unofficial web standard many websites adhere to.
If the landmarks are absent Discourse presents a box with just the URL along with some text along the lines of “A preview can’t be generated.”
If something about the landmarks aren’t quite in compliance with the unofficial standard, then Discourse might get confused and put stuff in, or leave stuff out of, the preview box.
Following Joey_P’s lead, this is the link with ?useskin=vector added. Could be a solution for a board of nerds but maybe not for a board of senior citizens.
